From Lonely to Confident: Inside the $20,000-a-Year US Boot Camps Teaching Men How to Talk to Women

A 55-year-old British divorcee stood on a sun-drenched street in Nashville, Tennessee, heart racing, and jogged between moving cars to stop a woman he had never met. He told her she was breathtaking. She turned away within seconds. It was over before it began. But for Steve Crook, it was only the start of a three-day journey that cost him thousands of dollars.

Crook is one of a growing number of men enrolling in intensive dating boot camps run across the United States, where coaches charge anywhere from a few thousand dollars for a weekend session to $20,000 (£15,200) a year for elite membership. The camps promise to teach men how to approach women, hold conversations and shed what instructors call 'nice-guy tendencies'. But what participants often find goes far deeper than dating advice.

The Men Behind the Mission

The Nashville camp is run by Matt Artisan, who leads The Attractive Man, a coaching company operating across the US, Europe, Asia and Central America. Artisan, who rebranded from his legal name Matt Ardisson after discovering the pick-up community in the early 2000s, says his approach has shed the scripted routines and manipulative tactics that defined that era. His coaching partner, Ike Shehadeh, was once a participant himself before turning his life around through the boot camp world.

A typical day at Artisan's Nashville camp begins with presentations inside a rented Airbnb, where participants take notes on techniques before heading out into the streets for what Artisan calls 'in-field' sessions. Evenings move to Nashville's bars and honky-tonks for 'night game' — a markedly different proposition, as Artisan himself acknowledges, given the unpredictable nature of a nightclub crowd.

The full weekend costs several thousand dollars per participant, with travel and accommodation on top. Those seeking ongoing coaching can join Artisan's 'elite' tier, which costs up to $20,000 (£15,200) a year and grants access to any of his boot camps worldwide.

'We Are Suffering from an Epidemic of Loneliness'

The men who show up to these camps are not simply chasing dates. Many are dealing with profound isolation. According to Pew Research, about one in six Americans say they feel lonely or isolated from those around them all or most of the time, with men turning to their networks less often for social connection and emotional support than women.

'We are suffering from an epidemic of loneliness,' said Brandon Viall, one of Artisan's participants at the Nashville camp. 'We're connected by all these screens, but is that real connection?'

Cameras Rolling, Women Unaware

One aspect of Artisan's camps that raises questions is the recording of interactions. Participants wear microphones beneath their clothing while Artisan films their approaches from a distance, playing the footage back later for group review — without the knowledge of the women involved.

Artisan defended the practice, saying: 'If we were posting it online, I think that would definitely cross the line.' He said the footage is used solely to assess participants' body language and delivery, not to capture the women themselves. He also rejected the idea of informing women in advance, saying such knowledge would make the interactions less useful as training material.

Participants were largely unbothered. 'I don't feel sleazy about it, because I'm not trying to be sleazy,' said Viall. 'I'm not doing anything nefarious.'

The question of whether these camps are genuinely building confidence or simply repackaging old pick-up artist techniques is harder to answer. Artisan traces his methods back to the movement popularised by Neil Strauss's 2005 book 'The Game,' and while he insists he has moved on from its scripted routines, the vocabulary remains largely unchanged: 'cold approaches,' 'day game' and 'night game' are still the building blocks of every session.

A Breakdown That Changed Everything

The most striking moment came not on the street but in a quiet room, where Artisan arranged a 'soul gazing' exercise — participants staring into a hired model's eyes in complete silence for several minutes. When Crook locked eyes with model Jenny Jackson, he broke down in tears.

'It was amazing... I felt like I got a glimpse into your heart, into your soul, and it was wild,' Jackson told him afterwards. Another model, Faith Gonzalez, was equally struck. 'It hurt my heart a little bit,' she said. 'You don't just cry.'

For Crook, it stripped back something buried for years. 'It was like a light-bulb moment,' he said. 'That's just part of my makeup. It's not that I'm weak.'

The boot camp industry is expanding rapidly. Artisan alone plans to run camps across more than a dozen North American cities by the end of 2026, with further operations in Europe, Asia and Central America. Coaches, including Artisan, publicly distance themselves from figures such as Andrew Tate, saying their focus is on building genuine confidence and social skills rather than manipulation.